Anyone gotten any farther with porting or tweeking the OS/Software on this little queen ? I'm interested in getting some other forms of video to work, as well as flac audio. (I downloaded the open source short movie Elephant's Dream and it's not recognized).

Thank you much,
Justin

P.S. I SOO bookmarked the torn apart A2 in the hopes someone will come out with a BIGGER little hard drive. (To fight off my iPod 60gig buddies .. But ours are 60gig).

I'd like to try replacing the hard drive on my A2 with a 40 gig Western Digital drive. The drive should fit perfectly but I've read in the forums that putting a different brand of drive might kill the A2. Is this fact (somebody's tried it), rumor, or educated guess? Also, I would like the pictures of that A2 that was taken apart in the russian forums; it seems they're not hosting it anymore.

Has anyone made anything of all this? I mean, it seems pretty easy, "porting" Linux on the Cowon A2, with the bulk of the firmware being open source, the bootloader being open source, the hardware similar to the Neuros products, which are mostly based on "open" Linux... With so many people seemingly interested, and so much information already out there, it's a wonder the progress on this hasn't reached "orgasmic" levels...

Ok, I might be overreacting, but still, I believe that, at the very least, having Linux boot into a console will be just a matter of cross-compiling to the A2's CPU, and flashing the firmware (If needed) with some kind of serial connection. It's a start, at least.

I just bought one of these devices. I love it except that it has some gay things about it, like no m3u support and mkv/ogm and subs/mutlichannel audio.

So to fix this problem I would like to beable to build my own linux OS to run on the thing and ditch all the cowon/TI stuff.

It looks like this platform is very beefy. Its based on the ARM925 and a TI320 DSP. (TI calls this pairing OMAP)

In order to build a linux OS for this thing we need to know a few things. I havn't been able to determine if there is a serial port accessable on the board. The ARM process I think dose have a UART in it, but I don't know if its wired anywhere. But there dose look to be a JTAG port (and maybe the serial port) at J14 at the of the PCB near the COWON text. If there is a serial port at one of these pins I have no clue if the cowon kernel output boot up information to this serial port or not. I do have reason to belive that there is a copy of busybox running in the background.

I believe there is enough nerd/hacker/geek types out there like me that could pull this off. Will probably need some people who know TI DSP Assembly language and DSP software designers to optumly use this platform. I don't think we can get away with just running everything on the ARM like normal linux stuff dose. (Maybe the audio, but video will probably need to be decoded using the DSP)

mkv/ogm had this problem my self fixed by using a converter for moving the ogm over to avi and then using avi recomp to change over to 1 channel for english, I also could have gotten the subtitles if the movie had them on it, it didnt.